Bernie Worrell (April 19, 1944 – June 24, 2016) – Everybody Is Going To Make It This Time (1972)

Worrell and George Clinton co-wrote this powerful message song from Funkadelic's ambitious double LP America Eats Its Young, feat. Worrell on keyboards.

Watch full video on YouTube.

The great keyboardist Bernie Worrell co-wrote and arranged many P-Funk classics as one of the members of Parliament-Funkadelic, and played a major role in the development of their sound.

George Bernard Worrell, Jr. was born in New Jersey. He was a musical prodigy who started piano lessons when he was three years old and wrote his first concerto at age eight. He studied at Juilliard and in 1967 graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music.

The town where Worrell grew up, Plainfield, NJ, was home to George Clinton’s barbershop and his doo-wop group The Parliaments, which is how he first met Clinton. He re-located to Detroit with Clinton and his growing collective of singers and musicians in 1968.

Worrell played on Funkadelic’s self-titled debut album, released in 1970, but remained uncredited until their second LP, Free Your Mind... and Your Ass Will Follow (1970). He co-wrote his first songs for the group starting with their third album Maggot Brain (1971).

Funkadelic’s fourth LP, the ambitious double album America Eats Its Young, was released in May, 1972. Worrell co-wrote six of the album’s 14 tracks.

America Eats Its Young was the group’s most political LP, and has been described as Clinton’s “grand statement” about the War in Vietnam and everything else that was messed up in America during the Nixon Era. Worrell and Clinton co-wrote one of the album’s most powerful message songs, “Everybody Is Going To Make It This Time.”

America Eats Its Young was the group’s first album not recorded in the U.S., with most tracks laid down in Toronto, Canada and the UK. “Everybody Is Going To Make It This Time” was recorded at Olympic Studios in London, with the assistance of former Cream and Blind Faith drummer Ginger Baker, although he does not appear on the track.

Besides Worrell on keyboards, it also featured Garry Shider on guitar, legendary Toronto R&B bassist Prakash John, and Tyrone Lampkin on drums. The track’s arrangement for its steel and string guitars was done by famed Motown arranger David Van De Pitte, who arranged What’s Going On. Vocals were by Clinton, Worrell, Calvin Simon, Shider, Diane Brooks and Steve Kennedy, who was a member of both Lighthouse and Blood, Sweat And Tears.

Happy Heavenly Birthday to the great Bernie Worrell!

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